A podcast all about Japanese cartoons and comics as discussed by three self-proclaimed experts in the world of anime and manga! Plus anime news / reviews, coverage of classic anime, hentai / yaoi, and much, much more. Updated every week. We hope.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Otaku USA deadlines are (mostly) behind us, our panels at Anime Festival Orlando are all done, which gives us a window of opportunity between now and Anime Weekend Atlanta to actually post something. Better get to it! This time, Clarissa's picking the shows for everyone. In return for what Gerald made her review, she's assigning him to review the Starship Troopers anime.

Introduction (0:00 - 29:45)
We forgot to put this in before. Fortunately, we're just answering emails as usual. None of us can identify the anime that is requested of us, but we did at least properly conclude that the film in question was not Japanese in origin. It was the French film Gandahar. We also find out that someone exists on this planet who has seen Voltage Fighter Gowcaiser entirely too many times (more than once!), and end with some discussion regarding how the Japanese handle lip sync in animation.

Let's News! (29:45 - 59:32)
Weird things are happening and it seems that Andrew WK, possibly the nicest guy in music, is bringing the world an album full of Gundam songs. The world is curious how on Earth this happened, and if we can get a sequel of just lectures about Zeta Gundam from Andrew WK too! Susumu Takaku has died, very sad considering he is probably responsible fo screwing up an entire generation of Japanese anime fans with having written Cutey Honey, Mazinger Z, Fist of the North Star Movie, and Devil Man. Also, Yoshinori Kanada has died, tragically early too, who also has a wide repertoire of works, we can forgive him for Birth, the show we secretly all love and hate. NO LONGER A SECRET NOW IS IT!? And because two isn't enough and four is too many, we have THREE deaths for this episode with the passing of Takuji Endo creator of Clarissa's favorite work EVER, Zetsuai 1989. In less death-y news, Noboru Ishiguro, director of Macross and, honestly, Yamato too, confirmed that a live action Yamato is in the works. Normally we wouldn't talk about this, but since it's Japanese, there is a slight likelihood it'll be made, we'll see if it can possibly be as good as the upcoming TV series! Then we talk about other stuff for a long period of time and show the world how unlistenable we are when we are not heavily edited.

Starship Troopers (59:33 - 1:34:44)
Oh man, Starship Troopers. If you can, watch this opening video along with us and maybe you'll see somewhat prepared for this rather awful piece from 1988:

Yes, as awful as that show is, it is reponsible for give us some of the greatest anime ever, specifically many of those 1980's real robot shows, and we owe it to the artwork in the 1977 re-release of the book. Here's the cover to give you an idea:
This, however doesn't allow for this show to have some of the very worst character designs to ever grace anime. While everyone in this show looks awful, its the females the suffer the most, and Carmencita suffers the most of them:

That's not even the worst shot of her, in face, that's pretty much how she looks in every shot.

The REAL show is below:Look in to that picture, and just see if you can get that out of your nightmares!